N.Y.C. mayoral race like therapy session

For more than three decades, New York City residents have had mayors who did their best – with varying degrees of success – to keep their personal lives off limits. Ed Koch was famous for it. So was Mike Bloomberg.

Even the disclosures about Rudy Giuliani’s life were mostly born of the private messes he’d tried to keep behind the curtain.

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That model has been upended in the past few months, as New Yorkers, in something of a post-therapeutic moment, have been braced by jarringly detailed disclosures about the marriages of one Democratic mayoral hopeful (Public Advocate Bill de Blasio) and one likely candidate (former Rep. Anthony Weiner).

The disclosures about the state of their marriages have arisen for very different reasons – Weiner is trying to move past scandal and de Blasio and his wife are speaking openly about her past identification as a lesbian. But the detailed level of sharing by both camps is remarkable in a city where, for all the liberal ethos, oversharing by citywide candidates has been relatively rare.

“It is unprecedented” to see such exposition, said Baruch College political science professor Doug Muzzio.

Weiner’s stark admissions about his marriage – there’s nothing missing from it, he said – and the hows and whys of his Twitter exchanges with strangers prompted his New York Times magazine interviewer to describe their sit-downs as feeling like therapy.

In de Blasio’s case, his wife, Chirlane McCray, gave a detailed interview to Essence Magazine about whether she is still attracted to women, how she felt meeting her husband, whether she considers herself bisexual, and how healthy their life and marriage are.

Asked by Essence how she went from being gay to falling in love with her to-be husband, she said, “By putting aside the assumptions I had about the form and package my love would come in. By letting myself be as free as I felt when I went natural.”

At another point she added, “I came out at 17. I hadn’t really dated any men. I thought, ‘Whoa, what is this?’ But I also didn’t think, ‘Oh, now I’m attracted to men.’ I was attracted to Bill. He felt like the perfect person for me. For two people who look so different, we have a lot in common. We are a very conventional, unconventional couple.”

At another point, asked if she is still attracted to women, she said she’s married and monogamous but “not dead,” and neither is her husband.

The interview stood out in part for being published months after the initial disclosure, by the New York Observer, that McCray had written about being a lesbian decades earlier. McCray and de Blasio, who managed Hillary Clinton’s Senate run in 2000, both discussed it at length back in early December, when the article she’d written was unearthed, and the issue had been put to rest.

Aides said she sat down for the interview in March, roughly four months after the initial disclosures. Asked why, McCray said, “I spoke out for the same reason I did in 1979 – to help expand understanding of identity and to speak to those who may feel like they’re all alone. I’m thrilled – as a woman of color – to have a forum to talk about my life and my values.”

In Weiner’s case, his openness about his marriage came in the context of a New York Times Magazine confessional interview, in which he talked about why he exchanged Twitter messages with strangers on the Internet.